If I can reassure you about Garage, it's not at all abandoned. We have active work going on to make a GUI for cluster administration, and we have applied for a new round of funding for more low-level work on performance, which should keep us going for the next year or so. Expect some more activity in the near future.

I manage several Garage clusters and will keep maintaining the software to keep these clusters running. But concerning the "low level of activity in the git repo": we originally built Garage for some specific needs, and it fits these needs quite well in its current form. So I'd argue that "low activity" doesn't mean it's not reliable, in fact it's the contrary: low activity means that it works well for us and there isn't a need to change anything.

Of course implementing new features is another deal, I personally have only limited time to spend on implementing features that I don't need myself. But we would always welcome outside contributions of new features from people with specific needs.